The Ragged Edge America Must Return To God And Self-Reliance

My view

I’ve lived in Kettle Falls for 24 years and very much feel a part of this community. I’m the wife of a state representative, the mother of four wonderful children, and I’m a Realtor who manages two apartment houses.

I feel blessed to live in America. Anyone traveling out of this country is directly confronted with the realization of how workable, progressive and rewarding the American way of life is.

But alas in America we have become so fat and weighted with the problems we have created, we cannot remove ourselves from the “easy chair.” And if we do not diet, the chair will crash to the floor. We have also become ambivalent, to the point of impotence, in upholding and strengthening those values and Biblical precepts which were the undergirdings of this nation.

There are two elements that need firm-hand decisiveness to reverse, or the greatness of this nation will be lost. I am talking about “greed” and “sloth.”

GREED: Entrepreneurs cannot continue sending our factories overseas to 27-cents-an-hour labor and returning the low-cost products, import-tax free, to the shop-till-you-drop mentality of the American consumer. The consumer has to realize that without reconciling the wage scale in America to the wage scale overseas, via some import tax to balance the equation, there will soon be no American economy at all.

SLOTH: Can you imagine the moral values of chastity and thrift that would once again be taught to our children if all parents were financially responsible for their children until they are 21 years of age? If we are going to remove this nation from the bondage of the welfare system, this is what has to happen. As it is now, a TV-watching teenage girl finds herself pregnant by the TV-watching, not-working, not financially responsible male and the Department of Health and Social Services is called to the rescue.

One hundred years ago if a young person became pregnant, she stayed with family. There were no videos, no welfare payments. The girl worked her buns off cooking, sewing, canning, gardening; and the boy worked his buns off working in the factory, or at the mine, getting the crops in, chopping wood and building a home for his expanding family. There was no sitting around the house watching the kids and watching TV. There was no excuse: “Well, I can’t work because I have kids at home.” And there were no food stamps!

Really, it sounds impossible to return to such, but if we are to save our nation, we must once again return to the disciplines of former years. Unfortunately, it usually takes a catastrophic economic crisis to return people to individual and “family” accountability. During floods, earthquakes and war people respond generously and genuinely. But the federal government and self-serving politicians still step in and provide relief. It seems that it will only be the total collapse of the American economy - when the government has no money to come to the rescue - that the people will once again be self-reliant.

Historically, nations who turned away from God’s basic principles and God’s authority and provision, failed. And when a nation returned to God’s authority, the nation prospered. The only true answer to correct our problems of greed and sloth is to return to and adhere to God’s word.